Background and Objectives:

The World Youth Forum (WYF): Advancing a Global Partnership for Youth Led Development was held three days prior to the Third session of the World Urban Forum (WUF III) and was a response to a request by youth to UN-HABITAT during the Second Session of the World Urban Forum (WUFII) held in Barcelona, Spain in 2004. During WUF II, the City of Vancouver, the Environmental Youth Alliance and UNESCO Growing Up In Cities (GUIC) hosted a panel discussion on youth and local government, to examine how young people can be brought more into the mainstream at the WUF III that was to be held in Vancouver, Canada, in 2006. For WUF III, the WUF II participants insisted that young people be brought more into the fold by having a conference several days prior to the main forum. This would then give youth a chance to articulate their position during the main WUF III programme. The young men and women also appealed to institutions and delegations of governments to work more closely with the youth.

Arising out of the highly successful World Urban Youth Forum, World Urban Cafes are built on a belief that young people and civil society have models of positive urban development that need to be disseminated in a way in which they can be replicated in other urban communities. The Cafés, as a form of youth-driven dialogues, celebrated and reflected on the role of youth and civil society in shaping our cities and communities. The WUCs included community elders and seniors, politicians and decision makers, civil society groups and international and indigenous communities.

As a partnership undertaking between World Urban Café and Habitat JAM, the World Urban Café JAM Sessions engaged communities in slum and impoverished human settlements in Asia, Africa, India, Latin America and North America. These World Urban Café JAM Sessions leveraged the strengths of face-to-face interaction with the global reach of the internet. Within this process key strategies such as the use of participatory research techniques and the identification of online "Community Champions" assured that the voices of these people were heard within the JAM. The WUC JAM Sessions engaged people living in slums in the themes of the seven JAM forums. All the WUCs were delivered in the most common language used by the attendees, and the dialogue data was later translated into English.

The WUC Jam Sessions were a synthesis of the WUC and the JAM. Both the WUC and JAM had the goal of bringing people together globally from all walks of life to collectively create solutions for the most pressing problems facing our cities. Through engaging a variety of local partners in each urban location where a WUC JAM Session was held, the programme offered interactive multi-media dialogue sessions with a focus on creativity and expression to reach and gain meaningful insight from an array of youth across the globe.

Activities:

Over 30,000 youth were mobilized to participate in this groundbreaking event, across the globe, as shown in the table below:

Results:

The WUC JAM Sessions were successful because:

• They were held in communities where marginalized people could participate.
• They engaged more than 15,000 impoverished and slum dwellers in the JAM themes.
• Data was collected manually, collated, and used to inform the discussion in the JAM - 3 day session
• The participants in the events expressed opinions collectively within the context of the JAM discussion forums.
• The findings of the JAM are being sent back to the communities for verification.

A primary goal of the WUC JAM Sessions was to engage participants in the JAM 3 day event. As it was important to have a "physical" presence in the JAM, each community that participated in the WUC Jam Sessions identified a Community Champion, who was responsible in bringing forward the ideas of his/her community. It was the responsibility of the WUC JAM coordinators to facilitate the internet access of this person.

Though there are barriers to slum dwellers and impoverished people accessing the internet and thus the JAM, the WUC JAM Session organizers committed to assuring that Community Champions from each WUC JAM accessed the JAM and represented their communities, and the findings from the WUC JAM Session.